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We live in a world of increasingly complex and intractable problems. These are especially evident in the environmental and social domains. They range from climate change and destruction of ecosystems, to scarcity of water and other critical natural resources, and to the disproportionate effects these growing scarcities are having on the poor of the world

We have deep intractable social issues, such as youth unemployment around the world and the growing gap between rich and poor. All these ultimately are economic in the same sense that all social and environmental issues ultimately show up in our economic system. No one is very happy with the ability of their economies to establish pathways of sustainable progress

Without reflection, people tend to just assume their point of view is the right point of view and defend and argue from that point of view. Reflection is a key gateway that opens people to beginning to think together and move from just arguing for about who is right to collaboratively solving the problems we all face

What is needed is a broad culture of innovation where diverse skills and dispositions merge to offer the best chance of a unique idea emerging and importantly making it to market. Significantly the definition of innovation very much includes the ability to deliver on the imaginative ideas Australians are known for but are presently handing off to international developers to capitalise on. For schools such a definition is useful as it encourages a shift away from vague conversations about creativity and imagination and looks at how these skills can be used in ways that bring about change

Innovation requires a pedagogy that values a student focused learning processes over teacher directed transfer of knowledge. Teaching for innovation is by nature messy and imprecise. In the short term results on traditional assessments may not be what we would expect from traditional methods but if we desire to produce innovators this needs to be accepted

Taiwan's Consumers' Foundation has called on local universities to take responsibility for improving English-language skills among their students, in view of the fact that a certain standard of English proficiency is a prerequisite to obtaining a degree.

The foundation urged the country's universities to help improve their students English proficiency by offering more training so that the students would not need to spend a fortune taking English classes at cram schools.

The elements that make up this approach are not necessarily new — great teachers have been employing these tactics for years. But now there’s a movement to codify the different pieces that define the deeper learning approach, and to spread the knowledge from teacher to teacher, school to school in the form of a Deeper Learning MOOC (massive open online course), organized by a group of schools, non-profits, and sponsored by the Hewlett Foundation.

So what defines deeper learning? This group has identified six competencies: mastering content, critical thinking, effective written and oral communication, collaboration, learning how to learn, and developing academic mindsets.

“Before we assess, we need to know what we are assessing for,” said Marc Chun, program officer at the Hewlett Foundation. What does effective collaboration look like? What does it really look like to be a critical thinker? These skill are more oriented towards process than content, making them difficult to assess in a standardized way.

English actually trails Chinese and Spanish as the third most commonly spoken language in the world, just ahead of Bengali, Hindi and Arabic. In 1950 about 9 per cent of the world’s population spoke English as their first language. That figure is now about 5.6 per cent.

While the proportion increases significantly when you add speakers of English as a second or third language, we’re still left with around 70-80 per cent of humanity not speaking English. Being a monolingual English-speaker places you firmly in humanity’s minority group.

The view that ‘English is enough’ fails to acknowledge that being bilingual or multilingual is an increasingly necessary passport to personal mobility, opportunity and prosperity, particularly in knowledge and services based economies where the ability to collaborate and communicate effectively across borders is a prized skill-set.